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All About Linux: strace - A Very Powerful Troubleshooting Tool for All Linux Users

"Many times I have come across seemingly hopeless situations
where a program when compiled and installed in GNU/Linux just fails
to run. In such situations after I have tried every trick in the
book like searching on the net and posting questions to Linux
forums, and still failed to resolve the problem, I turn to the last
resort which is trace the output of the misbehaving program.
Tracing the output of a program throws up a lot of data which is
not usually available when the program is run normally. And in many
instances, sifting through this volume of data has proved fruitful
in pin pointing the cause of error..."